So the Association Against Audiovisual Piracy (ALPA) thinks that piracy is going to put the movie industry out of business.

Wow.

They go on to cite many cool statistics and tell fun stories (read about it on ars technica), but they leave out a very important question: Would the people who are pirating these movies go to them in the first place?

Seriously, would they? I’ve known people who might download a movie to check it out, but they would never pay money for it, so are these really dollars that the movie industry can honestly say that they have lost? Or are they just hoping against hope to get people to stop pirating?

They should look at this from a different perspective. Honestly, people are going to pirate movies, music and other things — people have been pirating things for thousands of years. What the movie industry should do, instead of spending money look at how much money they’re losing is to spend that money to look at piracy from a different angle.

How can the movie industry live with piracy? What can they do to shift the paradigm in their favor? That, my friends, is the real question.